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" If I hear a story or a fact about somebody I don't know and have never met, it's like getting a hollow vessel that you can fill up with whatever you want. That's more tempting to me than to try to replicate what I actually know. "

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" Obstruction can be caused by so many factors - perfectionism, distraction, faltering confidence, external demands and pressures. At some point, of course, you've got to push through it all if you're to write, and if you don't, or can't, you're sunk. "

Claire Messud

Distraction

You

Push

" Everybody's always living in fiction just as much as children, but the way our stories are faked is curtailed by all sorts of narratives we take into our own lives about what are the true narratives and what's not. "

" In a globalised world, so many of us move around so much. You lose things, but you also gain things - or hope to gain them. "

" I wish I were a really good photographer. "

" If you're rich, you can leave a library, a building, or a hospital wing. But writing leaves behind a visceral sense of what it was like to be alive on the planet in a particular time. Writing tells us what it meant for someone to be human. "

" For many of us, we set out thinking there will be time in the future, and then suddenly we find ourselves at a moment when we have to acknowledge that the future isn't infinite. "

Claire Messud

Find

Future

" I feel as though there are things that I'm trying to do - you know, capturing truthfully some aspect of human experience - and I'm trying really hard not to be fake. And in writing, as in life, it's harder than you think. "

" Especially since having children, a lot of the time if you ask me, 'Have you read that book?' the answer would be 'not personally.' "

" I'd wish for my work to be remembered rather than myself. "

" Obama was the first president whose biography makes sense to me. He can walk into a room anywhere and find common ground with any person. "

Claire Messud

Find

Person

" I sometimes feel like a British writer more so than I feel like an American writer. But I think that has to do with my subjective understanding of what it means to be either of those things. "

" I still believe on some level that at the end, somebody will say, 'You get an A-minus for your life.' And it's not true. It's not true. "

" For me, the ages between 9 and 12 were great because it was before you wore any masks, and you had some autonomy in the world. You had some freedom, and you felt you had unlimited ambition. It's when you thought, 'I'm going to write plays. I'm going to be president. I'm going to do this; I'm going to do that.' And then it all falls apart. "

" If I had to summarize, most broadly, my concerns as a writer, I'd say the question 'How then must we live?' is at the heart of it, for me. "

Claire Messud

Heart

Live

" I always say to my students, 'If you can do anything other than writing and be happy, then you should.' "

" Writing with kids is an adventure. It seems like someone always has the flu or pink-eye. I mean, you don't even have to be in direct contact with anyone to get pink-eye. But for parents who write, flexibility becomes essential, and as long as I have a pad of paper and a pen, I can write anywhere. Starbucks is fine. "

" If you took my reading and writing out of my head, I don't know who I would be. "

" What is the truth? Is it what you experience? Is it what I experience? Or is there some objective truth in between? "

" The fictional narratives that television, film, and the news provide for girls and young women are appalling. "

" Years ago, I worked in a newspaper office, and there were men that would have fits of temper, and it was just accepted that that's who they were, and everyone would laugh about it, but if a woman got upset or angry, something wasn't right: she was 'hysterical' or 'a little unhinged.' It didn't have the same sort of connotation at all. "

" I was someone who believed that every day should be different from the last. "

" This sense in which so much of who we are doesn't break the surface - our knowability to one another is always something I like to explore. "

" An abiding preoccupation for me is how much of our lives are invisible and unknown by other people, like the Chekhov story 'The Lady With the Little Dog.' "

" You lose something in not being rooted, but you gain something by seeing the world differently. It's both a loss and a gift. "

" I have said it somewhere - our literary lived lives are as important as our literally lived lives. "

" Carmiel Banasky, a writer like no other, is a talent to watch. "

" Women aren't supposed to want stuff. They're not supposed to have high emotions. "

" We read to find life, in all its possibilities. "

" Because we moved so much, I was always having to adapt and work out the lay of the land. So I felt envious of those who did not have to try. "

" For me, the watershed was Hurricane Katrina. If that didn't get people out on the streets, then what will? "

Claire Messud

People

Hurricane